Rt Hon Winston Peters
New Zealand First Leader
21 March 2013

Government Not So Colour-Blind

New Zealand First says the Government is talking rubbish when it states that its immigration policies are colour-blind when in fact they are exceptionally favouring Chinese reunion parents.

Rt Hon Winston Peters says despite policy changes to rebalance the parent category, the Government refused to give assurances that the number of Chinese reunion parents will fall this year to a proportion more aligned with parent migrants from other countries.

“Parent category policy changes last year prioritise parents who bring in $500,000 resettlement money without considering the impact this could have on the Auckland housing bubble.

“The policy changes have also resulted in parent category applications dropping from the UK and India, but increasing from China.

“We will be scrutinising the statistics due out for the June 2012/2013 year.”

New Zealand First policy is to cap parent category migrants to 20 per cent of the skilled migrants from every country.

“This is fair because it allows all skilled migrants to have a fair chance of parent reunion,” says Mr Peters.

ENDS

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Arguably Reassuring: Inspector-General Finds GCSB "Arguably" Legal

Of the 88 individuals:

• 15 cases involving 22 individuals did not have any information intercepted by GCSB.

• another four cases involving five individuals were the subjects of a New Zealand Security Intelligence Service warrant and the GCSB assisted in the execution of the warrants. The Inspector-General is of the view that there were arguably no breaches and the law is unclear.

• the Bureau only provided technical assistance which did not involve interception of communications, involving three of the individuals, so no breach occurred.

• the remaining cases involved the collection of metadata, and the Inspector-General formed the view that there had arguably been no breach, noting once again that the law is unclear.
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